With the emergence of jungle to the level of mainstream
consciousness, musicians and listeners responded to this
music in various ways. While some ravers disenchanted with
the moodiness of drum and bass returned to the hyperoptimism
of hardcore acid house to fashion a movement known as happy
hardcore, other artists, particularly LTJ Bukem and
the duo known as 4Hero, introduced a gentrified version
of jungle known as intelligent drum and bass
(Reynolds 334–50). This problematic name is meant
to signify a self-conscious foregrounding of the legitimately
musical or artistic elements of
the music. In many cases, producers smoothed over the nervous
aspect of the breakbeat rhythms and situated them under
harmonically rich ambient textures or sampled jazz sonorities.
[Listen
to LTJ Bukem, Demons Theme] In other words,
the music celebrates a traditionally Eurocentric conception
of what musical intelligence should be about:
intelligent drum and bass producers stress the complexity
of pitch material and the sensibility of acoustic craftsmanship
over the intensity and chaotic nature of the breakbeat.
In other instances, the location of intelligence
is in the degree of intricacy with which producers parse
out and manipulate the fragmented breakbeat rhythms that
constitute the primary substance of drum and bass. These
producers—such as Squarepusher, Luke Vibert, and others—pushed
the density of syncopation and rhythmic complexity to a
level of virtuosity that situated the music within a zone
of abstraction, undermining its connection to the dance
floor.

Yet another group of artists—many of whom had
been associated with the drum and bass genre since its early
manifestation as a clandestine underground culture—reacted
to the smoothness and pretentiousness of intelligent
drum and bass by fashioning a music consisting of sparse
textural accompaniment and lean, fierce polyrhythms. Music
by artists such as Roni Size and DJ Die, Dillinja, or Lemon
D renounces the preoccupation of some intelligent
producers with conventional, humanist models
of musicianship and accentuates the musics brittle
artificiality. This music frequently sounds brutally technological
at the very same moment that it brings to the fore the metric
ambiguities and rhythmic subtleties of Afrocentric music
making (Reynolds 350–53). [Listen
to Roni Size, Timestretch] At the same time,
their music affirms a hardcore connection to
the dance-floor audience: if intelligent artists
tend to market their music towards home us—for headphone
listening or private contemplation—these latter musicians
maintain a sensibility in their music that very much lends
itself to dance.

Rupert Parkes, known
to most listeners as Photek, has taken up a musical direction
that mediates between elements of both of these strains
of drum and bass that I have described here. The starkness
of his tracks and the intricacy of his breakbeat manipulation
are such that most of his work tends to center the listeners
awareness upon the percussive aspects of drum and bass,
the sense of contingency and vicious uncertainty that breakbeats
are capable of embodying. In the same manner as intelligent
drum and bass, his work in large part circulates in the
form of albums for home stereo consumption. Nevertheless,
his tracks transmit a sense of immediacy that bears little
in common with the more ethereal mood put across by an artist
such as LTJ Bukem.

The question of where this music is consumed is an important
one for the purposes of music criticism. Someone who has
largely come across drum and bass as a private listener
has a different perspective from that of a clubgoer, not
only in the sense that those attending clubs are permitted
a more proactive, bodily reaction to the music, but also
in the sense that the listening experience held by a clubber—hearing
the DJ mix the track seamlessly into the continuous stream
of music played throughout the night—differs significantly
from that held by a listener who hears the track as a discrete
entity unto itself. One problem that a
contextually informed music criticism would, to my mind,
consider is that of how to talk about a musical experience
that does not have a carefully bounded beginning and end
in the manner of most of the works of the Western classical
tradition.5

For example, Simon Reynolds notes with respect to drum
and bass that the experience of dancing for six hours
to this skittish, schizophrenic music is such that the dancer
becomes wired into a situation where upheaval is the norm,
where mind and body become locked into a kind of siege mentality
(355). Even at the level of the individual track, the sense
of immediacy brought on by the musics constant succession
of breaks and surprises completely messes with the listeners
sense of temporality. Over a longer period, the effect of
this music upon the dancer or listener must be particularly
acute, weirdly telescoping or truncating his or her sense
of time. If we are to begin to understand how this and other
genres of electronic dance music work, we must be aware,
in considering individual tracks, of their potential insertion
into a musical environment where the preceding and following
elements in the mix will alter the meanings we discern in
them. With this in mind, I would like to turn to Photeks
single entitled Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu (Two Swords Technique)
with the intention of examining some of the forces that
are at work in the genre of drum and bass.

A succession of three distantly and unevenly spaced
sounds reverberate in the opening seconds of this track,
marking out temporal space in a manner that renders us acutely
aware of the silence between
each event. Time seems to take on a quality of presence,
as opposed to a succession of discrete moments. [Listen
to Photek, Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu, excerpt 1] If we
have taken the first drumstroke that we hear as the strong
downbeat, however, a new pattern of deeper drum notes emerges
to undermine this temporal orientation. Until the rapid
breakbeats make their entrance, we do not get a sense of
how these lower beats fit into the metric conception of
the work. Even the release of tension produced by the entry
of the breakbeats catches the listener unawares, bursting
forth from a syncopation on the second beat of the seventeenth
bar, rather than its strong downbeat. Parkes drum
programming for the breakbeats is unbelievably intricate,
with the pattern almost never remaining the same for each
succesive measure. He uses the relative profundities and
durations of each of the drum sounds to create microcosmic
cycles of tension and release that are in themselves set
off against the clashing of the duelling samurai. [Listen
to Photek, Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu, excerpt 2] This
is music that keeps the listener on edge; even in the resounding
silences, the potential for upheaval is too palpable to
let us be at ease.

The upheaval of the breakbeats, however, takes place within
broader spans of time, set up by the lower-pitched drum
samples. This produces a hierarchical tension between the
moment-to-moment immediacy of the breakbeats and the ominous,
elongated silence between the sounds made by the lower-pitched
drums. This rhythmic construction, combining quadruple-tempo
snare beats with half-tempo bass, is fairly common in Photeks
work, and in drum and bass more generally. The more deliberate
plodding of the bass notes gives the sense that higher-order
machinations lie behind the rhythmic assault of the breaks.
This sense of rational form deliberately underwriting
the irrational, chaotic content of the breaks
works to reinforce the conception of drum and bass as a
synechdoche for the urban experience, articulating the unseen
connection between the random violence of the street and
the ordered aggressiveness of larger structures of power.

Parkes breakbeat constructions draw attention to
a peculiar tension in drum and bass music between the human
as organism and the human extension through technology.
While the rhythms give the semblance of having been improvised,
being radically non-redundant unlike any other genre of
electronic dance music , the actual process through which
these beats are matched together entails a painstaking method
of pre-programming that flies in the face of the musics
seeming spontaneity. This is music that requires immense
patience: Parkes has noted that with the track entitled
UFO, for example, the breakbeat itelf took four
days to construct, even before he began the process of breaking
this pattern down even further and manipulating it to create
the diversity of the final tracks rhythmic construction.
[Listen
to Photek, UFO] Parkes very much wants to hang
on to the label of jazz musician; he sees his own music
as deriving from an abstraction of the process of improvisation
(Parkes). The listener or dancer, in the end, will likely
respond to the music in that spirit, constantly listening
for new permutations of the groove to come forward. However,
the hyperkinetic rhythms of the end product can only derive
from a process of alienation between the programming musician
and the machine that ultimately realizes his or her conception
in real time: In the same moment that the computer empowers
the producer, allowing unparalleled control over the final
product, the producer is wholly reliant on the computers
power to manifest his or her musical decisions. In the moment
of performance, the sequencer and sampler take over and
relentlessly execute a procedure that now unfolds completely
beyond the musicians control. The rule of the machine
alone comes to supplant the uneasy partnership of biology
and circuitry that lends the music its cyborg complexion.

In order to more clearly illustrate why the notion of
the sublime might intersect with our consideration of processes
of music-making in drum and bass, it might be helpful to
look at Mark Johnsons ideas concerning what he calls
image schemata. Johnson
argues that the separation between mind and body that has
been articulated in various ways in the Western philosophical
canon is a construction that does not bear up against evidence
from our experience as human beings.Rather than making a
brute distinction between concepts or Ideas
located in the mind and a brute, unintelligent body, Johnson
argues that all of our most fundamental conceptions of the
world derive from our bodily experience. As our body learns
to orient itself in the world, it begins to understand other,
less immediately physical notions in terms of its experiences
as a body; these understandings become consolidated as bodily
metaphors that Johnson refers to as image schemata.
In locating the metaphors we live by as residing
as much in our muscle memory as in our cerebral cortex,
Johnson articulates a world-view that provides a powerful
explanation for the power of music: the rhythms and melodies
we hear take on so much meaning as a result of the ways
that they map out against other ways that we experience
time as bodies.

In this light, it becomes all the more important that
we understand the ethical implications of a music that is
largely disembodied in its execution and yet deeply embodied
in the dancers that respond to it. The dancer—whose
role it is to embody the intricate rhythms pounding forth
from the speakers—has to attempt to take up a kinesthetics
of the superhuman, has to bring his or her body up to the
threshold of realizing the bodily implications of these
radically disembodied rhythms. This, otherwise stated, comprises
the sublime: the fractal-like complexity of the rhythms
that the producer conceives of in the abstract have to be
met by the imagination of the dancer, imagination
in this context consisting of the dancers fundamentally
embodied envisioning of the music. Insofar as
rhythmic patterns form analogies of manipulating the body
in time, the mechanistic virtuosity of the sequenced rhythms
of drum and bass frequently results in a situation where
the body is at a loss to respond to all of the musics
intricacies. In this moment of failure, the dancers
body becomes enraptured through the ways that it has extended
its capacities, and yet much of this rapture derives from
the terror that it experiences in not being able to live
up to the metaphors that the computer is generating.

It is important to note that there is a racial dimension
to this notion of an embodied sublime. One of N. Katherine
Hayless principal concerns in How We Became Posthuman
is the question of how information lost its body,
the complex process through which the Cartesian mind/body
split has become radically reinforced in discourses about
information technology and cyberculture (2). In doing so,
she sets up a dichotomy between the contemporary posthuman
and an earlier notion of the human that is based
upon the hegemonic liberal humanist conception of subjecthood.
However, Alexander Weheliye has taken Hayles to task for
her failure to confront the specific ways in which subject
positions outside of this Westernized humanism might complicate
her historical narrative. For Weheliye, black subjectivity
has always stood in problematic relation to that of liberal
humanism, owing to the particular historical profile of
a people that has often been systematically reduced to bodies,
each one denied the status of personhood (21–6).

The challenge that black subjectivity poses for the posthuman
manifests itself with particular intensity in the sphere
of black popular music. Weheliye foregrounds the inescapable
remainder of the body that resides in even the most radically
synthetic forms of contemporary hip-hop and R&B, with
technologies such as the vocoder or the digital sampler
being used to smuggle the traces of embodied experience
into the realm of the artificial (30–40). Against
this backdrop, the context of the dancefloor in drum and
bass magnifies this racialized dimension of an embodied
posthuman in a powerful way. This music harnesses a specific
tension between the suppleness of its appropriated Afrodiasporic
stylistic gestures and the mechanistic coldness of its cyborg
complexion. This tension carries an especially frightening
expressive force, because the dance floor is a site that
dramatizes the radical split between cerebral producer and
embodied dancer.

5. This issue has been
taken up elsewhere in musical and non-musical contexts alike.
Christopher Small, for example, presents analyses of performance
situations as social situations, stepping outside of the reifying
confines of atomized musical works. Raymond Williamss
analysis of television takes a similar approach, as he foregrounds
the element of flow that holds compartmentalized TV programs
together over the course of a viewing.